by Joe Zabel
Finnish artist JJ Naas's Desert Rocks is a fantasy, but hardly takes notice of the fact. Instead it conjures up a convincing, tangible world that in many ways resembles our own.
Three travelers meet on the road one day, and journey to a nearby hostel. One is a young man, Coen, who's a political refugee from his homeland, Saaher. The others are young women, Nizna and Mayna, occult students from Tinaret who are traveling from temple to temple as part of their education.
The next day, Coen has a run-in with a mischievous princess, and ends up in a dungeon waiting to be executed. But he and a fellow prisoner escape, and head back to the hostel to hide out. Shortly after, Nizna and Mayna aide the fugitives to escape on a boat.
Afterwards, they part ways, and the story continues to follow their adventures in parallel tracks. Nizna and Mayna eventually reach the temple of the New Moon Seers and begin their instruction. Coen gets a job at a date plantation and has further adventures there. He also develops a friendship with a young female worker named El.
The ongoing story is rich in anecdote and has many suspenseful scenes, including a scary run-in with a pack of sapphire panthers. Particularly intriguing is a protracted treasure hunt Coen and El are conducting on the date plantation with their friends. They believe that the doors to the underworld are somewhere nearby, and Coen finds a fragment of pottery with clues to its whereabouts. As they find more fragments from the ancient vase, more of its message comes to light.
The strongest aspect of Desert Rocks, however, is the talent Naas has for inventing details. A worker on the date plantation has his pay docked for breaking a knife; Mayna encounters snow for the first time; the students at the temple must race across a bridge to avoid freezing; El talks of being harassed because of the pagan style of her earrings. The characters constantly talk politics, and a picture of the recent history of several otherworldly governments slowly comes into focus. The series actually has the feel of an auto-biographical tale!
For a fantasy, Desert Rocks shows very little in the way of magic. Nizna attempts to make a dog sit and howl with a psychic communication, but the dog merely scampers over and steals a bun. And Coen buys an amulet that apparently becomes invisible if you don't know it's there. That pretty much is it! At the temple, the instructors speak of taking control of one's aura to scan the surrounding world, but so far it's all lecture and theory, a far cry from Hobwarts.
The alien world imagined by Naas is an odd combination of ancient and modern cultures. The young people have the appearance of contemporary youth, and oftentimes similar attitudes; they could be European or American students touring the Far East. The temple school has the atmosphere of a college campus, complete with cafe get-togethers and late-night parties. In fact, it's difficult to pinpoint the state of technology. There's no motorized travel, but one character wears eyeglasses, Nizna and Mayna take notes in class with what looks like a ballpoint pen and a notebook; and a recent scene takes place in what looks like a contemporary clothing store, complete with suits on hangers.
Also odd is something that seems to be missing from the story-- in a word, sex. At the temple there is a boyfriend/girlfriend relationship and a girl with a crush on a ranger; and earlier in the story Nizna and Mayna are accosted by an innkeeper who wants them to sleep with him. And that is all. Coen spends time alone with young female characters, but never makes a pass; and none of the other characters seems particularly interested in the opposite sex.
The story seems a bit superficial, and perhaps the dearth of sexual relationships is one reason why. Also, I suspect the mixture of modernity and primitive culture perpetuates the notion that the characters are mere tourists, however much the author wishes to immerse them in the otherworldly culture.
The story also is somewhat lacking in narrative thrust. The narrative follows characters wherever they go, without a sense that they are headed in a particularly meaningful direction. At the end of chapter 7 Mayna suggests a reason for this. She believes that part of their mystical training is to travel from temple to temple in order to "see with our own eyes what the world is made of... This way, they force us to see the world from different angles and draw our own conclusions about... things."
The artwork has a pleasing style, loose and bold and garnished with realistic detail. Naas is particularly good at rendering natural backgrounds, making the travelogue that much more enjoyable. Unfortunately, the story was begun when he was a rougher, less experienced artist. He has re-drawn the first two chapters, but chapter three should probably be redrawn or re-inked as well. Some of the later chapters experiment briefly with duotone and color. This is intriguing, but a little distracting from the story.
Nevertheless, this is a substantial work, expressive and entertaining, that blazes its own trail and resists the temptation to take shortcuts.
